Money is not enough when you can't drink dollar bills. Forget the arguments about how much should be donated by different governments or how much the Queen is going to donate. The real issue is that the richest countries in the world need to set up some kind of organisation for dealing with disasters like these.

The USA the European Union and the United Nations are each talking about setting up co-ordinated relief efforts which may take weeks or months to become effective. There needs to be mechanisms in place that can be activated at a moments notice to help save lives in these situations.

It will take more than a few tens of millions of dollars. It would need a commitment to spend billions to set up an organisation that can go into a country and build a basic infrastructure from scratch in days rather than months.

Louise Ferguson has asked the question : "Is this an appropriate time for governments, relief organisations and international bodies such as the UN to reassess how the Internet can best be used in the future?"

Why not use the expertise of Google, Amazon, E-bay, PayPal and Wikipedia to build a resilient internet based system that would allow people to pay for specific relief supplies. They could also build Wikis that would allow information about individuals to be made available world wide. People could donate their time and use these systems to try and help track down lost friends and relatives.

Our governments should be putting much more effort into dealing with these world-wide issues, but perhaps we should make a start by thinking about how we can use the Internet to build a system that can help co-ordinate the good will and generosity of the worlds citizens to help to save the lives of the people who most need our help.

How To Donate

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) is an umbrella group of UK charities including, among others, British Red Cross, Cafod, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund